ITC Fridays

[Rob McCow]

Friday nights have become a bit of a TV 'thing' in our house. We've recently waded through 4 wonderful seasons of Blakes 7, enjoying a double bill each Friday with a glass of beer and an ice cream. (Usually Magnums! Yum.)

Anyway the crew of the Scorpio had their trip to Gauda Prime the other week so we've been debating what to watch next. We settled on a couple of ITC series to run in tandem and took the unprecedented step of ordering them from Network DVD outside of the sale period.

So, our Friday double bill will now consist of an episode each of:



AND



I wonder what we've let ourselves in for?

[Nyder]

I've not seen either of those so let me know what you think. Saturday afternoons are still The Persuaders! for me, although I haven't seen any in weeks. I've got a feeling my Tara King Blu-Ray will feature prominently soon in my viewing schedule. Must make time for B7 Series 4 soon too!!

[Rob McCow]

Blake's 7 S4 (or Avon's 4 + 2 Computers) is wonderful. Far better than I remembered. The only real stinker is Animals, you've got endearing nonsense like Headhunter and Stardrive, then there's genuinely brilliant eps like Orbit, Sand and Gold.

[SiHart]

What have you let yourself in for? every week it'll be me singing along to the Man In A Suitcase theme?

[Jonno]

My Friday nights are a trip back 35 years. Inspired by TOTP81, I aim to watch the corresponding episode on its 35th anniversary along with the corresponding Sapphire and Steel and nearest Doctor Who.

So tomorrow night it's TOTP of 22/01 (as aired last Friday), Assignment 3 Part 6 and Warrior's Gate Part 4.

[Rob McCow]

Assignment 3 is the future time-travel one in the flat, isn't it? And with Warrior's Gate Part 4 as well, January 1981 must have been a bizzare and frightening time.

[Andrew Curnow]

Friday night's (like Macra) do not exist at Curnow Towers - or at least, they do, but not for watching DVDs.

Weekend breakfasts on the other hand, the dogs & I are currently enjoying:
The X Files on Saturday (season 1)

Tennant's Tenth Doctor @ Ten on Sundays - by which I mean, we've started rewatching OldNuWho from season 2 onwards. It's a little shocking to realise it's now ten years since Tennant's first season!!

[MacNimon]

I've started a rewatch of the old ITC series as well. I just watched the first episode of Department S a few weeks ago and will be juggling it along with Danger Man, The Saint/Return Of The Saint, The Persuaders, The Baron, Randall & Hopkirk, The Prisoner and Man In A Suitcase. With non-ITC The Avengers thrown into the mix as well. Although not Sapphire & Steel at the moment, as I don't own it on dvd/blu-ray yet...the big problem is what to watch next...

I've also started rewatching X-Files as well, Andrew, seeing as it's appeared for streaming on Amazon Prime. I've only watched the first two episodes so far but it's the first time I've seen these since the early 90s and they're a real treat so far! I'm really looking forward to the episode 'Ice' as it's the first one I ever saw back in the day...

[Andrew Curnow]

How funny, Ice was what we watched last Saturday. It's a looong time since I saw any X-Files so I've forgotten a lot of them - so far, though, they're standing up very well for something 20+ years old. Wherease when I was rewatching Babylon 5, which is about the same age, that's starting to look a bit creaky in places. (Mind you, so am I!!)

[Stuart Wallis]

Given what happened to the Man In A Suitcase theme, shouldn't this thread be called TFI ITC Friday? Yes, I know, too many initials...

[Rob McCow]

Department S - Six Days

I had to have the premise of Department S explained to me. It's clear that they solve cases too 'Strange' for the normal police, but there are a couple of things going on that are not immediately clear. Most confusing of all is the Mark Kane / Jason King writing thing, especially in this episode where the female agent (sorry, I'll get their names next week) keeps refers to Jason as Mark Kane in order to tease him. Nowhere is it said that Mark is a fictional character in Jason's writing!

So this is not an obvious pilot episode, except it is because it's about a plane that goes missing for six days. Bernard Horsfall is the pilot and Peter Bowles is one of the passengers, so they really should have been on guard. The mystery deepens as Dept. S find out that all the passengers have the same syringe marks on their arms...

Really enjoyed this one and I liked the way the mystery changed it's focus without straying too far from the original idea. It's obvious someone diverted the plane and drugged the passengers, but then the questions become "Who" and "Why?" There are secret cameras, hidden snipers, car chases and obligatory punch-ups before it's all resolved. The Department S team are very likeable and although Peter Wyngarde clearly dominates, you get the feeling that he's the maverick of the team rather than the central focus. The other characters have their own strengths too, female agent proves to be very resourceful and quick-thinking, quickly coming up with a tarty cover story when she's caught spying.

A word on the locating filming, because they clearly had a lot of access to Heathrow airport. It's fascinating to see glimpses of how it looked back in the early 70's (?). Much of it is still the same, we've definitely been through that tunnel on the way in from the M4. I can't imagine them letting them film that sniper scene now though.

Good, solid ITC stuff.

Man In A Suitcase - Man From The Dead

A young woman is walking down the street when she sees someone she recognises. She goes to tell a policeman because shock horror it's her dead father! More shock horror when the woman turns out to be Angela Browne who played No.36 in the Change of Mind episode of The Prisoner!

Somehow this makes the headlines. Possibly because her father was high-up in the US Secret Service, which now operates entirely out of London. A man named McGill sees the headlines and realises that his old boss (Harry) might still be alive. This is important because Harry ordered him to allow a scientist to defect to Russia. As a result, McGill lost his job and had to become a maverick private eye. So if McGill can find Harry he can prove that he was ordered to let the scientist defect!

Lots of gritty espionage follows on from this. McGill is hounded by Russian agents and his own men as he tries to find out if Harry really is back from the dead. He spies on Harry's daughter, Rachel and saves her from being abducted by Russians. Eventually he meets up with Harry in a football stadium, but the Russians are closing in. Harry only came back to say goodbye to his daughter. McGill gives them a chance to escape and there's a thrilling sequence where he's mobbed in the middle of the football pitch by dozens of thugs, who beat the crap out of him. It's surprisingly bloody.

The police arrive and scare off the thugs, but the US Service agents tell him that the scientist who defected is an undercover spy. They have to keep McGill on the run to avoid blowing the scientist's cover. And so he heads off, back into his suitcase.

Again, I was very impressed with this. It was gritty but entertaining, quite John Le Carre.

Lots of London locations, including Belsize Square, although I don't know where the football stadium was. Most likely it's long been pulled down.

This episode also featured Stuart "I'm better than this" Damon from The Champions and The Adventurer.

[Stuart Wallis]

Based on what's a stone's throw from Belsize Square, the football stadium was possibly either the Edward VII sports ground in nearby Brondesbury, or maybe the athletics track on Hampstead Heath?

[SiHart]

I thought it looked like a dog track...

[Rob McCow]

I think I might be refering to this website in future:
http://www.freewebs.com/maninasuitcase/locations.htm

However, there's nothing on the dog track / stadium!

Edit: Oddly, the Avengers fan-site has a better list here:
http://avengerland.theavengers.tv/suitcase.htm

MAN IN A SUITCASE: Man from the Dead (Pat Jackson: August 1966)
Climax of the episode shot at White City Stadium.

And Wikipedia fills in the gaps:

White City Stadium (originally The Great Stadium) was built in White City, London, for the 1908 Summer Olympics and is often seen as the precursor to the modern seater stadium and noted for hosting the finish of the first modern distance marathon. It also hosted greyhound racing, swimming, speedway and a match at the 1966 World Cup, before the stadium was demolished in 1985. It was the first Olympic Stadium in the UK.

Long gone!

Further Edit: It was at the location occupied by BBC White City, which have recently been relocated to Salford. The premises are now set to become a campus for Imperial College.

[MacNimon]

Gld to see that you enjoyed them, Steve! I love those old ITC series, even though they're often formulaic with the punch-ups etc...that's just part of their charm, I suppose! And great reviews, it's in-depth posts like this I miss most round here these days! Keep them up, and I'll chip in whenever I can

[Rob McCow]

Department S - Trojan Tanker
I think I've got their names now. There's Jason King (Obviously), the other guy Stuart and Annabelle. Still haven't caught the boss's name but I'm all ears.
Trojan Tanker is not a reference to a certain brand of contraceptive, but instead starts off with a tanker getting involved in an accident. Nobody is seriously hurt, but when the driver of the other van looks through a little hole in the back of the tanker he sees... a beautiful woman! Unconscious in a little cabin with seats on either side! The ambulance arrives - but the woman is gone!
I'm starting to think that Dept S deal with cases that the police can't be bothered with.
An unlikely trail via a left-behind cigarette lighter leads the team to Nice, via a stop-over in Rome. Don't get excited, they only leave the studio to go to Pinewood, with stock footage of planes filling in the international gaps. There's some comedy business at the Nice resort as the find the girl from the tanker (Veronica Bray), who has a rather tall boyfriend. When Jason hits on Veronica, the boyfriend hits Jason. Stuart later has a fight with him and duffs him up good and proper. The fight is a highlight of the show, which isn't surprising when you consider that stuntman-turned-director Ray Austin is directing this one. Mike Read also turns up uncredited as a tanker driver!
Eventually they work out that a team of villains is going to use the tanker to sneak into an airport and steal £2 million of gold arriving in a plane. From there on it's all pretty easy to sort out and the French Gendarmes round up the villains in no time. There's just room for an utterly random denouement in the Alps where Stuart and Annabelle complain about Jason using the plot in his latest Mark Kane book.
Department S is shaping up to be a pretty decent series. Very Avengers-esque with Wyngarde making the show distinctive in it's own right.

Man In A Suitcase - All That Glitters
Episode 2 for McGill (Episode 10 according to IMDB! What's going on here?!) and one that features the Suitcase a bit more prominently. Far away from the glamour of international travel, McGill heads down to the Cotswolds on the trail of a missing child. Aspiring politician Michael Hornsby has sent him on the case, but what connection does he have with the boy? (Guess, go on).
Lots of Doctor Who actors this week, including Edward "Meglos" Underdown, Barbara "Planet of Fire" Shelley, Derek "Greg Sutton" Newark. Duncan "Dirty Wee fighters" Lamont and a very brief appearance for Kevin Stoney as the barman. There's also Eric Thompson, father of Emma Thompson.
McGill uncovers a thoroughly seedy get-rich-quick plot masterminded by some incompetent yet dangerous goons. It all leads to a tense shoot-out as the boy is handed over, with a lot of dead bodies on the floor before the episode is over.
This is really, really great stuff. Closer in tone to The Sweeney than your standard ITC show, it's very cynical and gritty. There are lots of interesting little twists and details, such as the hostage-takers making McGill drive up and down all night before they meet him. The wife of the politician is also well-characterised as a smart cookie who has always known exactly what was going on, but left it up to her husband to actually tell her.
The theme tune is fantastic and I'm starting to think the show is as well!

[MacNimon]

I haven't had the pleasure of those episodes yet, at least not in the last 20 years or so. I saw all the Man In A Suitcase episodes years ago, but only a handful of Department S ones. There are still significant gaps there to fill, beginning with this one!

My ITC fix this week was provided by Patrick McGoohan in Danger Man, in an excellent Season 2 episode, Don't Nail Him Yet, which featured a young Jackie Pearce and Wendy Richard among it's guest stars. This episode sees John Drake befriend a man who's suspected of passing secrets. An excellent episode in which Drake 'accidentally' enters Rawson, the suspect's, life and seemingly has much in common with him and uses this to his advantage. Nice to see location filming here as well rather being entirely studio bound, at Fulham's football ground this time.

[Rob McCow]

We certainly thought about Danger Man as one of the options for our Friday night viewing. I'd hope that it would have the thriller elements of The Prisoner but without being too surreal or strange. Sounds like they're also quite thoughtful and intelligent.

[Stuart Wallis]

the other guy Stuart

I never thought Lew Grade was entirely without taste...

Mike Reid! Well let's mention The War Machines, which I happened to be watching recently. We know he was playing extras about this time.

[MacNimon]

I've always liked Danger Man, I bought all the VHS releases back in the 90s and caught some (but not all) of the episodes when they were shown on Bravo a few years later. I remember, though, that when I saw them broadcast on Channel 4 in the mid-80s(?) I wasn't so keen on the earlier first season episodes which only had a running length of 25 minutes and seemed a bit basic even by the standards of the day.

The DVD boxset which I own is the one which features all 47 50-minute episodes from Seasons 2, 3 & 4 (although S4 only comprised of 2 episodes)



But by far the most enjoyable thing about this series is just how interchangeable the character of John Drake is with that of Number 6 in The Prisoner. This isn't just an actor playing two different roles, it seems pretty obvious watching this that John Drake is Number 6...

[MacNimon]

Which brings to mind an interview with McGoohan I read a year or two back, possibly on the Danger Man website, in which McGoohan stated that Number Six was actually intended to be Drake, but due to copyright issues over the characters name and a falling out with Danger Man creator Ralph Smart who wanted the (Danger Man) series to continue as it was for a complete fourth season (while McGoohan had by this time tired of the format and wanted to experiment with it more), they were never able to officially state that this was the case.

I'll have to try to search for that interview...

[Rob McCow]

Ah, all the ITC adventure stories are set in the same universe / world!

Which reminds me there was gratuitious use of music from The Prisoner at the start of the All That Glitters episode of Man In A Suitcase. They shared the same composer - Albert Elms. He also worked on The Champions and Benny Hill (!).

[Stuart Wallis]

Which brings to mind an interview with McGoohan I read a year or two back, possibly on the Danger Man website, in which McGoohan stated that Number Six was actually intended to be Drake, but due to copyright issues over the characters name and a falling out with Danger Man creator Ralph Smart who wanted the (Danger Man) series to continue as it was for a complete fourth season (while McGoohan had by this time tired of the format and wanted to experiment with it more), they were never able to officially state that this was the case.

I'll have to try to search for that interview...

I have a vague memory of Patrick McGoohan being interviewed on telly many years ago, sort-of confirming this.

[MacNimon]

And speaking of the music in both these series, the themes for both The Prisoner and Man In A Suitcase were by a certain Ron Grainer...

[Rob McCow]

Oh blimey, got to Friday and haven't put anything up about last week's episodes! Lax.

Department S - The Man From X

A couple in a car are making out (hey, wasn't that the start of last week's episode?) when a man in a suitcase - sorry I mean a man in a spacesuit takes a few steps towards them before collapsing on the pavement.

Who is this spacesuited man and what was he doing in Soho? Could it be something... a bit kinky? Time for Department S to get involved.

Apparently we've jumped forward to something like episode 16, but it doesn't matter. The order of these stories on the official Network DVD releases is a bit odd, I'll have to check the reasoning.

Anyway, the spacesuit is from Farnham Airport where Stewart goes to visit the Reverend Ernst Matthews from Ghost Light (John Nettleton as Carter) who clearly has something to hide. As Stewart investigates the airport, a liquid oxygen cannister is placed in his car. When he leaves, the laughing gas starts to get to him and he only narrowly escapes before the car explodes.

While Stewart is in hospital, Jason identifies the dead astronaut as a safe-cracker and immediately tries to get his leg over their sister at a groovy discotheque. We see people dancing, groovily, at a completely different discotheque before cutting to Jason and Leila.

Jason works out that they must need a new safe-cracker who is coming in from the US - they apprehend the safe-cracker at the airport and Jason decided to impersonate him. Annabelle follows them as they leave the airport, but when they realise they are being followed they force Jason to shoot her!

Anyway, Tony 'Glitz' Selby is one of the thugs and they end up cracking this safe through the basement of a frozen food factory, hence the need for the spacesuits. Stewart and Annabelle also turn up in spacesuits and proceed to beat up the bank robbers one by one, hurrah.

Good fun episode this, watching the flamboyant Jason King go undercover as a US Safe-cracker is paticularly amusing. Although it did go a bit all over the place.

Man In A Suitcase - Sweet Sue

Oh, but Sue is far from sweet! McGill is employed to follow, Sue the daughter of a rich industrialist (Mandel), because he thinks that Sue is falling in with the wrong sort. What's worse is that it obviously went badly in the end for Mandel as he ended up as the caretaker at Grange Hill - he's played by the perennially bald George Cooper.

Anyway, Sue's friends are a pair of con-artists/theives called Colin and Charles, who help themselves to her father's safe when her back is turned. They're some of the most tawdry villains I've ever seen on an ITC series.

McGill charms Sue in front of Colin and Charles - they end up inviting him to a poker game with another friend. They plan to rig the poker game against McGill and take his money.

Two things that make this great - McGill is so cool when Colin and Charles first confront him, challenging them to flip a coin off the table in the same way he's been casually doing. Of course they mess it up. Later, McGill spots the obvious tells at the Poker table and angrily calls them up on it. Again, Richard Bradford is fabulous in this scene. They're way out of his league.

The result is a huge fight. Conman Colin ends up knocking McGill out and dangles him out of a window, waiting for him to wake up so that he'll feel the fall and smashing onto the rocks below. Nasty! Eventually Colin ends up going over the balcony of the hotel foyer. A really nasty, petty death for a petty villain.

I was impressed with the characterisation. Sue isn't convinced that the people she is with are con artists and when she finds out, she doesn't care. It's only when the violence kicks off that she realises what she's got herself into.

The final scene is fabulous too. Sue has left and McGill tells Mandel to phone her daughter and tell her that he really cares. He picks up the phone and speaks to his secretary to call Sue... but changes his mind and puts the phone back down.

If that wasn't enough, Jacqueline Pearce swans in as an ex-lover of Colin! She had gone to the police when she found that Colin had swindled and abused her, but in the end decided to withdraw her evidence.